SHIMMERWITCH.SPACE

Asterism

Full Moon
Dev Blog #08

8 November 2022

Testing sound effects

Until now I've had no sound effects in the game, so I figured it was a good time to add some placeholders in to test the tone and placement of them. Since the majority of the game is levels that are curated to music tracks, I'm currently thinking that I won't want additional sfx on top of the music... but that needs testing. There are other places, such as menus, the space between music levels, and the intro level that would probably benefit from sfx. So my goal with the sfx initially is to get some sounds in as quickly as possible that have roughly the right tone.

I'm still pretty new to audio design and foley, but I have done a couple of projects before that I've recorded my own sounds for (e.g. This System). For me, the quickest way I can get either graphics or audio into a game is to sketch / record it myself on my phone, do some basic editing on my computer, then add it straight into Unity. This is why a lot of my games end up with a collaged feel, and also why I'm a big fan of flat games. Here's a photo of me recording some rain sounds for This System:

My phone is a Samsung Galaxy A40, which I bought a few years ago because it was the best camera I could find on a second-hand phone at a reasonable price (16MP regular + 5MP ultrawide camera + 25MP front camera, so it's quite versatile). I'll probably be using this phone for all the photography / video recording to create the final art assets in Asterism as I like the quality it produces and the portability of it. It's great for making stop-motion animations like this:

It also seems to record audio really well using the Samsung Voice Recorder app that came on the phone. There's a small amount of noise but for my purposes that's not really an issue. I have just ordered a portable field recorder though so that'll be interesting to see the difference in sound quality and ease of use etc.

I wanted to share some of the sounds I made last week. I went round the house recording anything that made a cool sound, and then used Audacity to edit, combine, and add effects. I like Audacity for this kind of work as it's fast to use and is pretty flexible without being overwhelming. These are the main effects I used while editing these sounds:

Maybe I'll do another blog post on this, but as a side note, for my music I've been 'sketching' in LMMS and will be doing more polishy versions of the songs in Ableton. For SFX so far though, Audacity has given me more than enough room for experimentation, especially since my aim is to get something functional and testable as fast as possible.

So here's a few samples of my before and after SFX!

Before: Bass guitar strings